Colin Petrakis

Gerald Novotny's kitchen smells like coffee gone cold in the pot for two hours, and you have been standing at his counter for eleven minutes not drinking it, looking at the calendar stuck to his fridge with a magnet shaped like a pierogi. Someone wrote HANNAH'S RECITAL on Saturday in blue pen, in his wife's handwriting, and under it, in his, a grocery list that starts with milk and ends with a word crossed out so hard it tore the paper. This is his life now. It was his life an hour ago too, and it will be his life tonight, and that is the whole problem — nothing in it moves. He is sixty-one and gray and comfortable and thick through the middle in a way that stopped being news to him a decade ago, and he goes to the same office and comes home to the same wife and eats the same dinner, and you have been him less than a minute and already you can feel the shape of every day stretching ahead like a hallway with no doors. You did not spin the wheel to become a man who is fine. You spin it because somewhere out there, right now, someone is in the middle of something you have never been, and there are seven hundred and ninety-six of them behind you and that number is the only thing that has ever felt like enough. You open the laptop on his counter, thumb already moving before the decision finishes arriving, and the page loads with its slow, patient wheel.

The dryer is still running when it happens, mid-tumble, a shirt-button clicking against the drum, and you are crouched with your knees complaining and a sock — one sock, gray, ribbed, a hole starting at the heel — pinched between two fingers that are not the fingers you had a second ago. Shorter. Thicker at the knuckle. A cold ring of metal on the left one. The fluorescent tube overhead buzzes at a pitch that finds a back tooth. You rock back on your heels, and the weight of the body settles all at once, low and centered, five-four and built close to the ground, and you nearly overbalance forward into the dryer door before something in the legs — his legs, already fluent in this crouch — catches you without being asked.

The sock is the first thing that opens. Static-warm, damp at the toe. A flash: him standing over a hamper at midnight, cheap detergent smell, his wife's voice from the next room saying *just leave it, it can wait until morning,* and him saying *no, if I leave it it becomes tomorrow's problem and I already have tomorrow's problem,* and laughing at himself for saying something so much like his father. Another flash, older: a machine at a laundromat on Nostrand Avenue, quarters lined up on top like a toll booth, twenty-six years old and furious about something that does not survive the memory, only the fury does. The dryer itself gives you the basement — the cinderblock cold coming up through the concrete into borrowed sneakers, a landlord who has promised to fix that light fixture since spring, the particular hum that means the upstairs neighbor's dishwasher is running too.

You stand, and the backpack strap he isn't wearing right now still has a phantom weight in the shoulder — that's from hours ago, campus, a lawn going yellow at the edges, a laptop balanced on one knee and a highlighter capped and uncapped forty times while he reread the same paragraph about labor markets and did not absorb one word of it, because his phone had a text from a name he still has saved as *Dani ❁* even though she is not supposed to still be in his phone, and it said nothing important, just *saw this and thought of you,* a photo of a dog that looks like the one they used to talk about getting, and he closed it and did not answer and felt like a thief for a week.

The shirt against your back — gray, thin, worn to softness at the collar — remembers itself going on this morning, sleeve first, the left one snagging on the wedding band the way it always does, a small domestic annoyance so old it barely registers as one anymore. His wife's voice downstairs already, keys, the specific creak of the third stair. He'd looked at himself in the mirror before the hoodie went over it — moustache needing a trim, eyebrow bar catching the light, forty-five and going back to school with men half his age and women who call him *sir* by accident and then apologize — and he'd thought, not for the first time, *this was supposed to be temporary,* and could no longer remember which part.

Under it all the body tells you what it is without translation: forty-five and holding, a lower back that announces itself on cold mornings, forearms gone lean and ropy from years of work that came before the classroom, hands that know a wrench and a stud finder and, apparently, how to fold a fitted sheet into a perfect square in nine seconds without looking, because that is what they are doing right now — corners squared, seams matched, a stack building in the basket with a precision that feels like the one part of the day he can control completely.

You look at the hands. Callused across the first two knuckles, ring dull with soap film, a sock still hanging from one finger like it forgot to finish being folded. You turn them over, both of them, the fluorescent light doing nothing kind for either.

"Okay," you say, to the socks, to the cinderblock, to nobody. "Let's see what today is."